Where have I been?
Mike told me the story of how, when Venom was touring Japan, there was no shortage of young Japanese girls willing to go on their bus and have sex with the band members. He said they had hidden a tape recorder somewhere to capture the sounds of these encounters and then had a contest to see which one of them could get a girl to make the most remarkable sounds during sex. Mike had been voted the winner after he got a girl to "bark like a seal" during his encounter with her. He had told her that that was what really turned him on...
Shawn Patterson had actually taken "the sensible approach" to a career in music.
hmm...Stephen Wright...what else can go wrong?
chorus:
I was up around 6 Monday morning.
This represent the achievement of having rotated my schedule around so that I was rising with the sun, rather than vice-versa.
By 8 o' clock, I had had a cup of coffee and one of kratom, and I opened up the piece of music I had done the day before in Audacity "just to listen to it."
14 hours later, I took a break from working on it, adding a second vocal and a little bit of lead guitar.
I found the spots where I had played through a section without making any glaring mistakes, and then repeated them 4 times, to replace the times I had gone through and either improvised a not so clever verse, or had flubbed a note on my brand new harmonica.
The mistakes came from my handling it with kid gloves, so as not to blow any notes out on it before I ever get a chance to go out and make 80 bucks playing it. There were spots where, had I had an audience reaching for their wallets to possibly throw a tip in my jar, I might have bent the hell out of a note, in order to wring as much emotion out of it as possible. But I was very conscious of the harp still being in its "break in" stage.
As I worked on the thing, ostensibly doing "Just one more thing" to it, while in the back of my mind thinking I was going to close it down and then go on Facebook, to see if I got any more messages from people in Massachusetts who had dug out some of the old cassette "albums" that I had recorded when I was in my 20's.
After I had posted a plea to people in New Orleans to steer me in the direction of any kind of job at all, I had gotten a message from a guy whose "friend request" I had accepted, without really remembering his name, or where I might know him from.
He was asking if I had any of my old tapes for sale.
Every year, from 1984 through 1991, I would compile an album of mostly my original songs, that I had recorded on my 4 track cassette deck.
Then I would make an insert by copying stuff on both sides of a suitable sized piece of paper that could be folded into cassette case size and stuffed in the plastic boxes so the tape could nestle in them.
These would have a photo or drawing of some kind, along with a lyric sheet, and other kinds of things that I had gotten the ideas for from looking at "real" cassette inserts from commercial music labels.
I would go to a certain place in Boston where I could buy custom length blank tapes, which were purportedly fitted with BASF "high bias" variety. It was pretty quiet and high fidelity stuff.
But, I would buy 40 or 50 (as my "popularity" grew) of them, in lengths like 23 minutes and 42 seconds per side, so that there would be no more than a few seconds of blank tape on the shorter side, after the last song ended.
The response to these ranged from "Wow, you did all that yourself? (1984) to "I can tell you've been practicing a lot" (1986) to "Whenever a bunch of my friends come over to party and listen to music, I always put on one of your tapes -you actually have a fan club in Templeton, Mass.." (1988).
But, everyone on my Christmas list was mailed the one from that year, and that included all the other musicians I knew from having taken lessons and hung out at the music store, and then the friends I had who were in bands.
The music was the antithesis of what any of them were required to play in clubs, under the thumb of some manager who might tap his watch while staring over at them, to inform them that their break was over.
They were in that particular business of playing the songs that people heard on the radio, the way they sounded on the radio, so that people would stay and buy drinks and dance and buy more drinks, type of thing...
"Well, if the customers like it, they will keep on payin';if they keep on drinking, then they'll end up stayin'" -Elvis Costello "From A Whisper to a Scream" (Columbia 7 02140-1)
I was wished very good luck by my musician friends who were working under such arrangements; for they knew that my path to success, doing original songs like mine would be one of sleeping on subways with a suitcase, a guitar and an amp all tied around my wrists, just so I could get some sleep before knocking on the doors of certain clubs that catered to the discerning and miniscule audience that went out to hear original music by artists whom they've never heard of.
The only way to populate a club with maybe 20 such souls, would be to cull them out of a city that has 5 million people in close proximity to one another.
And, to play for "the door" which would be 20 times whatever each of them was willing to pay to check you out -maybe 2 dollars, or maybe 3 dollars which would cover a "first beer free" kind of thing, with the manager taking the 3rd dollar out of the "door."
The idea was that, if 20 people saw you and you were actually worth something as an entertainer, then they would each tell 5 of their friends to check you out, and, maybe within a month "the door" would be able to feed a band of 4 very skinny musicians a couple of hamburgers each, before they went nighty-night on the subway bench.
And I would be trying to play at clubs such as The Rathskeller, in Boston, right across from Fenway park (and where you had to be vigilant of being clunked in the head with a baseball that had just been thrown by a major league pitcher, before being batted out of that park by Ellis Burkes, or Jim Rice, or Rick Burleson, of the 1985 era Red Sox.
The Rathskeller, through this proximity, took on the aura of being in the major league of clubs where a band that is eccentric and does their own material would want to play.
But, the Talking Heads, and The Cars and The Jon Butcher Axis and The Jim Carroll Band, that "came out of" that club were the tip of an iceberg, in which were petrified a huge, countless mass of nameless subway sleepers...
So, my musician friends in my home town wished me a lot of good luck.
"I can tell they're not New York musicians; they're not skinny enough," said a friend of mine named Mike Hickey, as we watched some band setting up at a club where we had run into each other.
Mike Hickey was "a New York musican."
He would wear what we now call "skinny jeans" in the mid 80's; and his legs were no bigger around than a stop sign post at their thickest point. A pendant on a necklace that he wore would literally clang against his collar bones when he moved around.
I remember watching him walk around the place, and was thinking: "If I was that skinny, I would probably wear baggy jeans, in order to hide the fact. He seems to want to flaunt his emaciation like an emblem, stating to the world that he is a New York musician. How in the world is he going to attract any girls, being so much the opposite of the "hunk" that females seem to gravitate towards...more like a sliver..."
Just then, as if to answer to my silent musing, a very beautiful girl who was standing near me, and had the same view of Mike drew in her breath, audibly, and then turned to her equally beautiful companion and half whispered: "That's Mike Hickey!" Then they both stole glances at him, as if already playing a game of not wanting to stare, so as to not appear interested in him.
I was tempted to interject something like "Yeah, all 85 pounds of him!"
I realized that at that point, that Mike's fame preceded him and that "the emperor" that he was, was indeed wearing clothes -skinny jeans, in fact- in the eyes of those beautiful young girls.
They were also there because one or both of their boyfriends were the ones in the band that was setting up, and they might have seen Mike as a possible conduit to "the big time," for they and their boyfriends.
But Mike was back in his home town, on break from touring Japan with a band named "Venom" and was that cities claim to fame, joined a few years later by Shawn Patterson, the guitarist in the band I was in, named (by them and certainly not I) Warp 5.
The only thing that made that band name remotely cool was the fact that there were just 4 of us. Had there been 5 guys in Warp 5, it would have just been too sickening to me, for some reason.
I never was a Star Trek aficionado, mainly because every episode cut for the first commercial at some point after something incomprehensible and head scratching had happened; and it never piqued my curiosity enough to want to wait 2 minutes before resuming watching and learn that it was "the Borg" up to their tricks, or whatever. But, I digress...
I never was a Star Trek aficionado, mainly because every episode cut for the first commercial at some point after something incomprehensible and head scratching had happened; and it never piqued my curiosity enough to want to wait 2 minutes before resuming watching and learn that it was "the Borg" up to their tricks, or whatever. But, I digress...
Mike Hickey was the best guitarist who ever played a guitar that I owned.
He did so, one particular time, after showing up at the Patterson's house, where I was in the basement, working on some of my songs. The fact that their practice room was literally a "padded room" seemed to make it and appropriate place for me to work on my stuff.
The fact that they were siblings put yet one more hurdle in the way of me ever being the leader of that group.
Shawn and Tim were out somewhere, and Chris, the drummer was up in his room with his girlfriend, so I had gone into the room and plugged in and was running through songs.
When I joined the band as a "front man" and singer, they already had about 2 dozen songs that they had learned together. And that meant that they had measured them out down to every beat with no room for any improvisation -hurdle number 2.
But, Mike had driven by and seen my Pinto parked out front and decided to drop in.
I had heard him play one time before, after I had just bought an Ibanez guitar that had the Floyd Rose™ locking nut whammy bar setup on it, which was the flavor of the decade in guitars, being heard on almost every album by every "hair band" of the 80's.
But, I was having trouble, learning how to tune the thing. When you tightened up one string, it would relieve the pressure off of the other strings, so they would go flat. If you brought them all back into tune, it would flatten the first string that you tightened up. I hadn't figured out yet that you had to over correct the strings the strings that were off, or you would be going back and forth forever.
I was living in a mansion on a hill at the time, which was owned by an older gentleman whom I had met from singing in the Bethany Baptist Church choir. I was the only member of that church who played rock music in bars on Saturday nights, and then donned a robe to sing with the church choir then next morning, hung over, many times.
That is a whole other aspect of that time period, the fact that the Pattersons gave me a lot of crap about being a "choirboy" and the damage that it could potentially do to my rock and roll "image."
And the baptists, holding hands with me in a prayer circle, praying that I would see the light, and realize how much damage playing in bars could potentially do to my choirboy "image."
But, Mike was a horse of a different color when it came to being judgemental.
For someone who had played on stage in front of thousands of screaming Japanese fans, and who could shred a guitar as well and anyone (literally anyone) that I have ever heard, he was humble, to say the least.
After I expressed my frustration over the Ibanez, and even told him I was thinking about throwing it in the lake in front of mansion. Associating me with the mansion I was staying in, he had taken this to be a serious threat (I could probably afford to do that) and tried to talk me out of it ("or at least give the guitar to me, before you do that").
He showed me how to tune it, then showed me a lot of the cool things that can be done with the Floyd Rose setup, which basically led to a full blown demonstration in the form of an amazing solo, using harmonics and blazing runs capped off with whammy bar dives, and it became clear to me that it wasn't the guitar that was holding me back.
The Mansion on the Hill by the Pond
And his first demonstration was at the mansion of Richard Cushing, who had coaxed me into moving in with him (and giving him 35 dollars a week, so that it couldn't be said, by any of the others who held hands and prayed together, that I was taking advantage of the old gentleman) after I had been forced to leave the place I had been renting, because the landlord was going to move one of his relatives in, who had recently become homeless.
This was 1988, and the word "homeless" was barely in the English vocabulary.
Now, two Bushes and an Obama later, and there's probably a homeless guy sleeping in the crawl space below my floor right now...
But, Mike was always very complimentary -he thought my Pinto was cool (with its dashboard missing, after I had removed it to install my stereo and then been too lazy to put it back in; wanting to start driving around immediately, listening to the Pioneer Supertuner™) and once, when I was listening to something I did in my studio, he walked over to my car and talked to me for a while, and then said "I like this" about the music; which surprised me, coming from a heavy metal guitarist.
It was kind of a pop sounding thing, done mainly using a keyboard, but with its share of Ibanez whammy bar dives in it.
It had the sounds of wind and rain as the background.
I had recorded that by sticking a microphone out one of the windows of the third floor, which was the one I occupied at Richard's house.
When I played the same thing for Mr. Cushing and then explained how I had recorded the storm the previous week, he gave out a sigh of relief.
He had seen the window open and had feared that I was smoking marijuana and trying to let the smoke and the tell tale smell escape. He apologized to me for what he had been thinking, and then added something like: "That just goes to show you what can happen when you rush to judgement; I thought for sure you were smoking something up there..."
Richard's family expressed happiness over the fact that I was living there, as if it made them feel better that someone would be around to help the 72 year old church deacon, should he fall and not be able get up, type of thing.
The 35 dollars a week I was paying kept me "honest" with regards to my not using him for a free ride, type of thing.
And, somewhere in the back of Richard's mind, he was hoping to sway me away from the bar scene and steer me towards Christian rock.
On the occasion when Mike Hickey showed up in the Patterson's studio, he again played amazing guitar while I sat 3 feet away, noting that there were no strings nor mirrors, just incredibly fast fingers, and a penchant for playing the most blasphemous sounding tones, that gave Richard that much more to try to steer me away from.
But, as we sat in front of the 150 watt Marshall amp with the 4X12 cabinet that was in the Patterson's padded room, and after he had demonstrated a variety of metal chops, he paused and asked: "You know what I really like the most, though?"
(Above) I handed Mike my guitar and he played it (kind of like this) then said: "There's nothing wrong with this guitar," and handed it back. Being a master of the whammy bar, he is somewhat limited by this Les Paul,in that capacity, for its lack of one...
"Uh..." I was thinking that he had yet another style of music in his toolbox, which he was about to show me.
"This," he said. He then turned the volume on the Marshall all the way up to ten and all the tone knobs up to 10 and played a solo that literally made the little hairs on my arms tingle from the vibration of it.
It's ironic how tiny "nuances" can be brought out of the electric guitar just by bringing incredible volume into play.
I was impressed enough to ask him -even though I was pretty dedicated to pursuing the music I had in my head, and if I had wanted to play metal, would already have made inroads in that direction (I would have at least owned a Marshall stack amp)- if he could show me something, in the way of a guitar lesson.
"Sure, I'll give you a lesson; a very good lesson, the best one that I ever got myself," he said.
Then he stood up with the guitar and told me: "When you bend a string, do this." Then he bent a string and bent his whole body along with it.
"And when you play a high note, play it like this!" He then played a high note while arching his back a bit and looking skyward, as if the note was actually coming down from on high.
And he gave a few more lessons which all involved body postures. It was like he was playing exaggerated air guitar, only with a real guitar in his hands, and actually playing the amazing kind of stuff people feel compelled to play air guitar along with.
And he wanted me to understand that he wasn't being sarcastic, he was well meaning through it all.
And his lesson has stuck with me, and there is a lot of validity to it.
For example, if you are having trouble learning to play a Prince song; just watch a video of him and mimic his dancing while you play. You will find that the hip bone is connected to back bone, and the back bone is connected to the...shoulder bone etc. and it all eventually runs to the finger bones; and you will be soloing over Purple Rain in no time.
Shawn and Tim were out somewhere, and Chris, the drummer was up in his room with his girlfriend, so I had gone into the room and plugged in and was running through songs.
When I joined the band as a "front man" and singer, they already had about 2 dozen songs that they had learned together. And that meant that they had measured them out down to every beat with no room for any improvisation -hurdle number 2.
But, Mike had driven by and seen my Pinto parked out front and decided to drop in.
I had heard him play one time before, after I had just bought an Ibanez guitar that had the Floyd Rose™ locking nut whammy bar setup on it, which was the flavor of the decade in guitars, being heard on almost every album by every "hair band" of the 80's.
But, I was having trouble, learning how to tune the thing. When you tightened up one string, it would relieve the pressure off of the other strings, so they would go flat. If you brought them all back into tune, it would flatten the first string that you tightened up. I hadn't figured out yet that you had to over correct the strings the strings that were off, or you would be going back and forth forever.
I was living in a mansion on a hill at the time, which was owned by an older gentleman whom I had met from singing in the Bethany Baptist Church choir. I was the only member of that church who played rock music in bars on Saturday nights, and then donned a robe to sing with the church choir then next morning, hung over, many times.
That is a whole other aspect of that time period, the fact that the Pattersons gave me a lot of crap about being a "choirboy" and the damage that it could potentially do to my rock and roll "image."
And the baptists, holding hands with me in a prayer circle, praying that I would see the light, and realize how much damage playing in bars could potentially do to my choirboy "image."
But, Mike was a horse of a different color when it came to being judgemental.
For someone who had played on stage in front of thousands of screaming Japanese fans, and who could shred a guitar as well and anyone (literally anyone) that I have ever heard, he was humble, to say the least.
After I expressed my frustration over the Ibanez, and even told him I was thinking about throwing it in the lake in front of mansion. Associating me with the mansion I was staying in, he had taken this to be a serious threat (I could probably afford to do that) and tried to talk me out of it ("or at least give the guitar to me, before you do that").
He showed me how to tune it, then showed me a lot of the cool things that can be done with the Floyd Rose setup, which basically led to a full blown demonstration in the form of an amazing solo, using harmonics and blazing runs capped off with whammy bar dives, and it became clear to me that it wasn't the guitar that was holding me back.
The Mansion on the Hill by the Pond
And his first demonstration was at the mansion of Richard Cushing, who had coaxed me into moving in with him (and giving him 35 dollars a week, so that it couldn't be said, by any of the others who held hands and prayed together, that I was taking advantage of the old gentleman) after I had been forced to leave the place I had been renting, because the landlord was going to move one of his relatives in, who had recently become homeless.
This was 1988, and the word "homeless" was barely in the English vocabulary.
Now, two Bushes and an Obama later, and there's probably a homeless guy sleeping in the crawl space below my floor right now...
But, Mike was always very complimentary -he thought my Pinto was cool (with its dashboard missing, after I had removed it to install my stereo and then been too lazy to put it back in; wanting to start driving around immediately, listening to the Pioneer Supertuner™) and once, when I was listening to something I did in my studio, he walked over to my car and talked to me for a while, and then said "I like this" about the music; which surprised me, coming from a heavy metal guitarist.
It was kind of a pop sounding thing, done mainly using a keyboard, but with its share of Ibanez whammy bar dives in it.
It had the sounds of wind and rain as the background.
I had recorded that by sticking a microphone out one of the windows of the third floor, which was the one I occupied at Richard's house.
When I played the same thing for Mr. Cushing and then explained how I had recorded the storm the previous week, he gave out a sigh of relief.
He had seen the window open and had feared that I was smoking marijuana and trying to let the smoke and the tell tale smell escape. He apologized to me for what he had been thinking, and then added something like: "That just goes to show you what can happen when you rush to judgement; I thought for sure you were smoking something up there..."
Richard's family expressed happiness over the fact that I was living there, as if it made them feel better that someone would be around to help the 72 year old church deacon, should he fall and not be able get up, type of thing.
The 35 dollars a week I was paying kept me "honest" with regards to my not using him for a free ride, type of thing.
And, somewhere in the back of Richard's mind, he was hoping to sway me away from the bar scene and steer me towards Christian rock.
On the occasion when Mike Hickey showed up in the Patterson's studio, he again played amazing guitar while I sat 3 feet away, noting that there were no strings nor mirrors, just incredibly fast fingers, and a penchant for playing the most blasphemous sounding tones, that gave Richard that much more to try to steer me away from.
But, as we sat in front of the 150 watt Marshall amp with the 4X12 cabinet that was in the Patterson's padded room, and after he had demonstrated a variety of metal chops, he paused and asked: "You know what I really like the most, though?"
(Above) I handed Mike my guitar and he played it (kind of like this) then said: "There's nothing wrong with this guitar," and handed it back. Being a master of the whammy bar, he is somewhat limited by this Les Paul,in that capacity, for its lack of one...
"Uh..." I was thinking that he had yet another style of music in his toolbox, which he was about to show me.
"This," he said. He then turned the volume on the Marshall all the way up to ten and all the tone knobs up to 10 and played a solo that literally made the little hairs on my arms tingle from the vibration of it.
It's ironic how tiny "nuances" can be brought out of the electric guitar just by bringing incredible volume into play.
I was impressed enough to ask him -even though I was pretty dedicated to pursuing the music I had in my head, and if I had wanted to play metal, would already have made inroads in that direction (I would have at least owned a Marshall stack amp)- if he could show me something, in the way of a guitar lesson.
"Sure, I'll give you a lesson; a very good lesson, the best one that I ever got myself," he said.
Then he stood up with the guitar and told me: "When you bend a string, do this." Then he bent a string and bent his whole body along with it.
"And when you play a high note, play it like this!" He then played a high note while arching his back a bit and looking skyward, as if the note was actually coming down from on high.
And he gave a few more lessons which all involved body postures. It was like he was playing exaggerated air guitar, only with a real guitar in his hands, and actually playing the amazing kind of stuff people feel compelled to play air guitar along with.
And he wanted me to understand that he wasn't being sarcastic, he was well meaning through it all.
And his lesson has stuck with me, and there is a lot of validity to it.
For example, if you are having trouble learning to play a Prince song; just watch a video of him and mimic his dancing while you play. You will find that the hip bone is connected to back bone, and the back bone is connected to the...shoulder bone etc. and it all eventually runs to the finger bones; and you will be soloing over Purple Rain in no time.
Mike told me the story of how, when Venom was touring Japan, there was no shortage of young Japanese girls willing to go on their bus and have sex with the band members. He said they had hidden a tape recorder somewhere to capture the sounds of these encounters and then had a contest to see which one of them could get a girl to make the most remarkable sounds during sex. Mike had been voted the winner after he got a girl to "bark like a seal" during his encounter with her. He had told her that that was what really turned him on...
Shawn Patterson had actually taken "the sensible approach" to a career in music.
He had gone to the Berkley School of music and then the Grove Institute of music, in Los Angeles, where he had gotten a degree in film scoring, and then had hit the pavement looking for work and was eventually hired by Warner Brothers, where he wrote the music for things that I know nothing else about, like "Robot Chicken," and "The Lego Movie," as well as one of those shows like "Family Guy."
When a cartoon parody of Aerosmith appeared on The Simpsons (was it?) the music, which sounded like Aerosmith songs just rearranged a bit and mocked a lot, was done by him.
This was apropos of the fact that, my biggest complaint about Warp 5 was that "they didn't have a creative bone in their bodies."
Shawn was a jazz student, and his "jazz" solos were comprised of riffs that he had learned off sheet music from artists such as Charlie Parker, played verbatim ("I started my solo with a Charlie Parker riff, which lead nicely into a Joe Pass kind of thing that I did next" was a typical thing he might say)
The riffs would "fit," alright, having already been fitted back in 1948 by someone like Wes Montgomery.
But, I wound up shaking my head after the irony evolved that Shawn would actually rehearse his "improvisations."
But, I wound up shaking my head after the irony evolved that Shawn would actually rehearse his "improvisations."
But that kind of went along with Shawn's attitude towards music in general, where he seemed to be devoid of any of the feelings that had inspired the music in the first place, and was not really trying to "say" anything with his solos (except maybe "I'm giving you a dose of some of the greatest jazz ever played; appreciate it, you morons!") but was rather only in awe of the technical acumen that went into it.
Left, one of only 2 people to like my performance at the Lose It at the Lake party.
So, it was kind of a cosmic joke that I would wind up in his band.
So, it was kind of a cosmic joke that I would wind up in his band.
And, that had come about after the brothers had seen me play at a party, which was held annually behind a large house on a lake, called "Lose It At The Lake."
The owner of the house, whose name was Michael Collette, was a champion of local music and would set up a Woodstock style stage, complete with lighting booms and the whole nine yards, in his back yard ever year, and would invite select musicians to play for what usually amounted to over 200 people (although a good 50 of them were the musicians themselves).
It was kind of an honor to be invited to play there as it ostensibly branded you as being "one of the best" local acts, and worthy of being bestowed with the blessings of Mike Collette.
A video of the whole thing was shot every year, ala the Woodstock Movie, and made available to anyone who wanted to pay something like 25 bucks for a copy. I shudder to think that my performance there was documented and is surely still in existence, in a stack of dusty VHS tapes in someone's attic, next to a dusty VCR that still might play (but probably could stand to have a demagnetizing* "head cleaner" run through it).
It had been a disaster for me, and the band that I had been able to assemble, by dangling the prospect of getting to play at Lose It at the Lake in front of some, as yet unknown, musicians that I knew. They had all been "in" immediately.
But, I had recently become a deadhead and my plan was to surrender to the muse and let inspiration come to me on the spot. To go up on stage with no idea of what I was going to do, and to surprise even myself, pleasantly I hoped with whatever I was able to pull out of thin air and play -the exact opposite approach from memorizing Charlie Parker riffs, to be regurgitated on stage.
I really didn't belong on that stage. I hadn't forged any musical identity through playing the local club circuit. Mike Collette certainly had never heard of me, but it was a good word put in his ear by one of my friends (who, to this day would probably deny ever doing so) that gave me the opportunity.
The Suffering Snails
The band consisted of a high school friend name Jeff Caisse (rhymes with bass...the musical instrument, not the fish) on bass, who was a very novice musician and certainly not up to the task of pulling music out of thin air.
And then there was Jeff's jamming buddy, Rick Shaw (yup, like the carts used in China to tote passengers around by foot) on one guitar. Rick was a big fan of the Irish band U2, which were at the crest of their popularity around that time; and would often try to "scratch" his guitar, ala "The Edge" from that band, usually with dismal results, and he was also a fish out of water when it came to scratching something out of thin air.
And then, there was Paul Zadrozny on drums, who was the drummer that the other 2 had been jamming with, in Rick's basement, whom I was seeing for only about the sixth time ever when he arrived for the party/gig.
A set of drums was already on the stage, for every drummer, as well as amps that just needed to be plugged into.
Pete Sawyer, a huge (but lovable teddy bear type) man was behind the soundboard, making sure that everyone was mixed and balanced.
He knew enough to add copious amounts of echo, as required, to any vocalist who was sounding a little shaky, such as when Ted Broughey sang "You Might Think," by The Cars, while also playing drums.
We had "scratched" the name "Sons of Heart Patients" for our band -we thought it a bit disrespectful to each of our father's, and in poor taste to make light of the fact that they had all underwent bypass surgury; and had gone on instead as "The Suffering Snails."
The other guy's looked to me as the moral leader, with my having been invited to play at L.I.A.T.L. speaking volumes about which one of us should be the moral leader.
It was most likely the members of Peer Pressure, who were right at the forefront of local bands, who had gotten me on the roster.
It was in a late afternoon time slot, before the sun had gone down and the light show came into play, and before half of the eventual crowd that would show up had arrived and -also working against us- before a dent had been made in the dozen or two kegs of beer that had been set up by the lake, because people were pacing themselves for an 8 hour event; but it was still a chance to go up on the Woodstock type stage.
It was in a late afternoon time slot, before the sun had gone down and the light show came into play, and before half of the eventual crowd that would show up had arrived and -also working against us- before a dent had been made in the dozen or two kegs of beer that had been set up by the lake, because people were pacing themselves for an 8 hour event; but it was still a chance to go up on the Woodstock type stage.
Peer Pressure's drummer was my best high school friend, Ted Broughey and I had met the other members through him.
It was their bass player Stefan Arsenault who was most encouraging of me, telling me once "You've got the look," after seeing some photos (see cassette cover above) of me with my guitar, taken in black and white by a friend for a photography course he was taking at Fitchburg State College, in 1980.
Maybe he had stopped short of saying, "now all you need is the music.
By then, I was into just the second of my Christmas albums.
The improvement from the first to the second was quite marked, though.
"Either Go To A School Like Berkeley, Or Take Lessons From Mark Marquis."
I had started taking guitar lessons from Mark Marquis in late 1985.
About undertaking a serious study of music, Stefan had said: "Either go to Berkeley, or take lessons from Mark Marquis. I opted for the guy who was 15 bucks an hour, and the equivalent of 4 years at a prestigious college.
I had to practice a bare minimum of 15 hours a week, or Mark would be able to tell that I hadn't done enough and would reissue me that same material again for the next week. It became plain to me that, by not practicing, I might be stuck on the same harmonic minor scales indefinitely. The fear of never getting any better grew within me.
It was only if I sat with a metronome for a long time that he would shrug, and say "OK, you've got that.." and then unceremoniously hand me the next set of chords or scales, as if there was plenty more where it came from.
The week after the first time that he told me my scales weren't good enough and that I had to come back the next week and play them better, I practiced for 36 total hours with a metronome. I had set goals for myself and, despite sometimes really wanting to stop practicing and go do anything else, I plodded on, until I reached a stage where I was able to let my mind wander into daydreaming while my fingers kept running through the exercises, as if of their own volition.
I never would have reached that plateau, had I not known that Marquis was going to flunk me for the week otherwise, and the practice turned into a kind of meditation.
It took all that for it to sink in to me that, by not practicing, you don't get better.
Bike Man The Song
But, one of the songs on the '85 tape was called: "Bike Man," and was based upon my experience with one Mr. Eugene O' Neil, of O' Neil's Bike Shop in the city where I grew up.
It was one of only 2 bike shops in our city, and residents seemed to patronize one of the other.
In the late 1970's mopeds enjoyed a modest uptick in popularity, due, in part, to the "gas crisis" of 1974 having made an imprint upon Americans, and the concerns people have about waste and pollution which are pretty much ongoing.
They got around 85 miles to a gallon of gas.
Both O' Neil's Bike Shop and Gamache Cycles (the other bike store in our city) had added mopeds to their lines of products.
My life's savings, at the age of 16 was just about enough to cover an $849 moped.
Not many other 16 year olds could say the same, and adults were unlikely to trade down from a car to a moped, even though gas prices had gone over a dollar per gallon for the first time in history in 1980, and so that is probably why the modest surge in popularity was short lived. People who could afford almost a thousand bucks for moped were just buying used cars for not much more instead. And thanking themselves every time it rained really hard when they were in those cars.
I had worked at a country club, from when I started caddying in 1974, until I was eventually promoted to an assistant to the Professional.
My boss was PGA pro Jim O' Leary.
When I was talking about wanting to buy a moped, Jim has said: "Why don't you go see Mr. O' Neil, if you're thinking about buying a moped?"
I was thinking that Mr. O' Leary might be just saying that to help out a fellow Irishman. He probably thought there was no material difference between me buying the same moped, for the same price, from one of the bike stores rather than the other (owned by a French man).
He had been my boss of for 4 years, and had done a lot to mentor me and mold me into the man I am today, type of thing,since those were the 5 very "formative" years from age 12 through 16.
And so, I humored him and went to O' Neils to buy the moped.
This was kind of against my intuition, though.
I would have preferred going to Gamache's Cycles because, whenever I went there, it was clean and spacious with shiny floors and there were what looked like trained staff using special equipment designed for bicycle repair.
But when I went into O' Neils dingy place, that looked like it had once been a stable, he had bikes being held by vices, and he would be whacking the heck out of something with a hammer, and kind of cussing under his breath, for example..
But, I bought a Peugeot moped from him (and I had actually forgotten to drop the name of Jim O' Leary while I was doing so, so he never got any credit for having sent me there).
But, the thing started having problems a month or so after I'd bought it.
It would gradually slow down to about 6 miles per hour, seemingly as it heated up. It would run like a champ on colder days.
So, I brought it in for repair.
During one of my visits to check on it, O' Neil was working on a bike, and as I stood there, he began to speak.
And I think, to this day, I still have his words memorized, they were as follows:
By then, I was thinking that Jim O' Leary had just known that the guy was Irish, and nothing else about him.
It was an excellently designed moped, that had a centrifugal slip clutch, which ingeniously changed the gear ratio based on the speed that the bike was going.
O' Neil had first told me that he had called some guy named Bud White and had put in a new spark plug as Bud had suggested, and that there was nothing else he could try, and would get me "a new bike."
But, after a time, he had reneged on that, telling me that I was going to have to pursue getting it fixed at a small motor repair shop, or something.
So, I got Ted Broughey to call him from a payphone in one of the lobbies at Fitchburg State, claiming to be a lawyer, in order to perhaps pressure him into giving me a new moped.
Ted chose to be "Attorney Stacie" once O' Neil answered the phone, "calling on behalf of our client, Dan McKenna, who say's you promised him a new bike..."
O' Neil then began to simmer a bit: "I took that bike for a ride, I rode all the way to the Goody-Goody (a general store about 5 miles out of Fitchburg) there's nothing wrong with that bike, it's the best bike made!
But, when pressed further, O' Neil swore to "the attorney" that he had "never promised him a new bike," and went on to further say that "someone told me he was doing sky jumps, on the bike; they saw him doing sky jumps with it! In Leominster (the next city over from Fitchburg).
"Please Calm Down, Sir; Get A Hold Of Yourself!"
When the lawyer told him "That's simply not true, Mr. O' Neil," the latter began to raise his voice and to insist once again that he had never promised a new bike, eventually reaching a boiling point to where I could hear his squeaky voice shouting out of the receiver from 10 feet away.
Ted started to counter-punch with lines like: "Please calm down Mr. O' Neil, get a hold of yourself, sir," until all I could hear was Ted repeating "Try to get ahold of yourself, calm down!" over a steady staccato of squawks coming out of the receiver.
And then Ted was able to get in: "I don't think you have both oars in the water!" before O' Neil hung up.
We enjoyed that so much that I wrote the song "Bike Man" and for the sake of it, we recreated the conversation by attaching a recorder to a phone in my parents bedroom (we had a phone extensions in all three bedrooms of our house, as well as one in the living room, and one on the wall in the basement. The fact that my dad was a long term employee of New England Telephone might have had something to do with that.) and so Ted picked up one of the other receivers, and me, yet another, while the recorder in my parents room captured both of our voices, sounding like they were coming through a phone, because they were.
Then Ted reenacted Attorney Stacy's part, and I was tasked with imitating the curmudgeonly bike man, and we recreated the conversation, complete with me yelling and screaming toward the end, and Ted telling me I didn't have both oars in the water, and then, for good measure, we free styled for a while for a while, with me throwing in some other things that I had picked up along the way from Eugene, like: "What we really need to do is get these bureaucrats out of Washington!" and Ted adding "I don't think your elevator goes all the way to the top, sir!" and all of it found its way onto the recording of the song while I vamped in a minor key on the guitar, and Ted went into a ride cymbal beat on the drums, which was funny because that is a common device that drummers use whenever an instrumentalist is soloing; it kind of puts the energy of the rhythm in the very high frequency range, so as to leave the melody instruments register uncluttered. So, just when you might expect to hear a sax solo begin, my imitation of Mr. O' Neil comes in.
*the way we got the dial tone to go silent after picking up the phones was just the dial one digit, where after the phone went silent, waiting perpetually for the next digit to be dialed.
Then, I used another innovation of mine by creating a section where O' Neil is speaking (the "send all the queers into the army" speech) with the rhythm being comprised of one of those bell shaped bells that go on handle bars, along with one of the horns that you honk by squeezing a rubber bladder, with additional percussion provided by the ticking of a ten speed wheel spinning and the spokes of a wheel being plucked rhythmically. Without knowing that Frank Zappa had already done it, I was pretty much playing a bicycle like an instrument. This was to paint the picture of O' Neil being in the middle of working on a bike while ranting away on the state of the nation, etc..
That came off the second Christmas album from 1985, which was called "Parallel Lines" and had me on the cover, sitting in the middle of a railway track, holding my guitar, with it photographed from an angle that made it look like its frets were in the same perspective as the railroad ties behind the guitar.
I guess this subject has come up, due to me getting a message on Facebook, after I had posted a status asking if anyone in New Orleans knew "of any jobs available around here."
It was from Paul Zadrosny, the guy who, 35 years ago, had played the drums at the one and only performance by The Suffering Snails.
He was offering to pay money for any of those old cassettes that I issued forth each Christmas for 5 consecutive years.
For trivia buffs, they were entitled:
1984 "What Can You Do?"
1985 "Parallel Lines"
1986 "This Is My Head"
1987 "Enlarged To Show Texture"
1988 "The Little Girl In The House on the Corner"
1989 "Law and Order"
Then, in 1990, after having dropped out of college, and started to work full time, the Christmas albums stopped. Having equipment stolen from me around that time didn't help the cause.
And having all of my cassettes stolen along the way means that I have none of mine to sell to Paul.
By then, I was into just the second of my Christmas albums.
The improvement from the first to the second was quite marked, though.
"Either Go To A School Like Berkeley, Or Take Lessons From Mark Marquis."
I had started taking guitar lessons from Mark Marquis in late 1985.
About undertaking a serious study of music, Stefan had said: "Either go to Berkeley, or take lessons from Mark Marquis. I opted for the guy who was 15 bucks an hour, and the equivalent of 4 years at a prestigious college.
I had to practice a bare minimum of 15 hours a week, or Mark would be able to tell that I hadn't done enough and would reissue me that same material again for the next week. It became plain to me that, by not practicing, I might be stuck on the same harmonic minor scales indefinitely. The fear of never getting any better grew within me.
It was only if I sat with a metronome for a long time that he would shrug, and say "OK, you've got that.." and then unceremoniously hand me the next set of chords or scales, as if there was plenty more where it came from.
The week after the first time that he told me my scales weren't good enough and that I had to come back the next week and play them better, I practiced for 36 total hours with a metronome. I had set goals for myself and, despite sometimes really wanting to stop practicing and go do anything else, I plodded on, until I reached a stage where I was able to let my mind wander into daydreaming while my fingers kept running through the exercises, as if of their own volition.
I never would have reached that plateau, had I not known that Marquis was going to flunk me for the week otherwise, and the practice turned into a kind of meditation.
It took all that for it to sink in to me that, by not practicing, you don't get better.
Bike Man The Song
But, one of the songs on the '85 tape was called: "Bike Man," and was based upon my experience with one Mr. Eugene O' Neil, of O' Neil's Bike Shop in the city where I grew up.
It was one of only 2 bike shops in our city, and residents seemed to patronize one of the other.
In the late 1970's mopeds enjoyed a modest uptick in popularity, due, in part, to the "gas crisis" of 1974 having made an imprint upon Americans, and the concerns people have about waste and pollution which are pretty much ongoing.
They got around 85 miles to a gallon of gas.
Both O' Neil's Bike Shop and Gamache Cycles (the other bike store in our city) had added mopeds to their lines of products.
My life's savings, at the age of 16 was just about enough to cover an $849 moped.
Not many other 16 year olds could say the same, and adults were unlikely to trade down from a car to a moped, even though gas prices had gone over a dollar per gallon for the first time in history in 1980, and so that is probably why the modest surge in popularity was short lived. People who could afford almost a thousand bucks for moped were just buying used cars for not much more instead. And thanking themselves every time it rained really hard when they were in those cars.
I had worked at a country club, from when I started caddying in 1974, until I was eventually promoted to an assistant to the Professional.
My boss was PGA pro Jim O' Leary.
When I was talking about wanting to buy a moped, Jim has said: "Why don't you go see Mr. O' Neil, if you're thinking about buying a moped?"
I was thinking that Mr. O' Leary might be just saying that to help out a fellow Irishman. He probably thought there was no material difference between me buying the same moped, for the same price, from one of the bike stores rather than the other (owned by a French man).
He had been my boss of for 4 years, and had done a lot to mentor me and mold me into the man I am today, type of thing,since those were the 5 very "formative" years from age 12 through 16.
And so, I humored him and went to O' Neils to buy the moped.
This was kind of against my intuition, though.
I would have preferred going to Gamache's Cycles because, whenever I went there, it was clean and spacious with shiny floors and there were what looked like trained staff using special equipment designed for bicycle repair.
But when I went into O' Neils dingy place, that looked like it had once been a stable, he had bikes being held by vices, and he would be whacking the heck out of something with a hammer, and kind of cussing under his breath, for example..
But, I bought a Peugeot moped from him (and I had actually forgotten to drop the name of Jim O' Leary while I was doing so, so he never got any credit for having sent me there).
But, the thing started having problems a month or so after I'd bought it.
It would gradually slow down to about 6 miles per hour, seemingly as it heated up. It would run like a champ on colder days.
So, I brought it in for repair.
During one of my visits to check on it, O' Neil was working on a bike, and as I stood there, he began to speak.
And I think, to this day, I still have his words memorized, they were as follows:
"...What we really need to do is get all these politicians and these bureaucrats out of Washington! And you can't vote 'em out, because they've already got the power. We need to take them by force!
The next thing we gotta do is take all these hippies and these homosexuals and send them in the army for a few years, that'll make men out of them! And the ones that don't wanna go, we kill them!" -Eugene O' Neil, circa 1977
By then, I was thinking that Jim O' Leary had just known that the guy was Irish, and nothing else about him.
It was an excellently designed moped, that had a centrifugal slip clutch, which ingeniously changed the gear ratio based on the speed that the bike was going.
O' Neil had first told me that he had called some guy named Bud White and had put in a new spark plug as Bud had suggested, and that there was nothing else he could try, and would get me "a new bike."
But, after a time, he had reneged on that, telling me that I was going to have to pursue getting it fixed at a small motor repair shop, or something.
So, I got Ted Broughey to call him from a payphone in one of the lobbies at Fitchburg State, claiming to be a lawyer, in order to perhaps pressure him into giving me a new moped.
Ted chose to be "Attorney Stacie" once O' Neil answered the phone, "calling on behalf of our client, Dan McKenna, who say's you promised him a new bike..."
O' Neil then began to simmer a bit: "I took that bike for a ride, I rode all the way to the Goody-Goody (a general store about 5 miles out of Fitchburg) there's nothing wrong with that bike, it's the best bike made!
But, when pressed further, O' Neil swore to "the attorney" that he had "never promised him a new bike," and went on to further say that "someone told me he was doing sky jumps, on the bike; they saw him doing sky jumps with it! In Leominster (the next city over from Fitchburg).
"Please Calm Down, Sir; Get A Hold Of Yourself!"
When the lawyer told him "That's simply not true, Mr. O' Neil," the latter began to raise his voice and to insist once again that he had never promised a new bike, eventually reaching a boiling point to where I could hear his squeaky voice shouting out of the receiver from 10 feet away.
Ted started to counter-punch with lines like: "Please calm down Mr. O' Neil, get a hold of yourself, sir," until all I could hear was Ted repeating "Try to get ahold of yourself, calm down!" over a steady staccato of squawks coming out of the receiver.
And then Ted was able to get in: "I don't think you have both oars in the water!" before O' Neil hung up.
We enjoyed that so much that I wrote the song "Bike Man" and for the sake of it, we recreated the conversation by attaching a recorder to a phone in my parents bedroom (we had a phone extensions in all three bedrooms of our house, as well as one in the living room, and one on the wall in the basement. The fact that my dad was a long term employee of New England Telephone might have had something to do with that.) and so Ted picked up one of the other receivers, and me, yet another, while the recorder in my parents room captured both of our voices, sounding like they were coming through a phone, because they were.
Then Ted reenacted Attorney Stacy's part, and I was tasked with imitating the curmudgeonly bike man, and we recreated the conversation, complete with me yelling and screaming toward the end, and Ted telling me I didn't have both oars in the water, and then, for good measure, we free styled for a while for a while, with me throwing in some other things that I had picked up along the way from Eugene, like: "What we really need to do is get these bureaucrats out of Washington!" and Ted adding "I don't think your elevator goes all the way to the top, sir!" and all of it found its way onto the recording of the song while I vamped in a minor key on the guitar, and Ted went into a ride cymbal beat on the drums, which was funny because that is a common device that drummers use whenever an instrumentalist is soloing; it kind of puts the energy of the rhythm in the very high frequency range, so as to leave the melody instruments register uncluttered. So, just when you might expect to hear a sax solo begin, my imitation of Mr. O' Neil comes in.
*the way we got the dial tone to go silent after picking up the phones was just the dial one digit, where after the phone went silent, waiting perpetually for the next digit to be dialed.
Then, I used another innovation of mine by creating a section where O' Neil is speaking (the "send all the queers into the army" speech) with the rhythm being comprised of one of those bell shaped bells that go on handle bars, along with one of the horns that you honk by squeezing a rubber bladder, with additional percussion provided by the ticking of a ten speed wheel spinning and the spokes of a wheel being plucked rhythmically. Without knowing that Frank Zappa had already done it, I was pretty much playing a bicycle like an instrument. This was to paint the picture of O' Neil being in the middle of working on a bike while ranting away on the state of the nation, etc..
That came off the second Christmas album from 1985, which was called "Parallel Lines" and had me on the cover, sitting in the middle of a railway track, holding my guitar, with it photographed from an angle that made it look like its frets were in the same perspective as the railroad ties behind the guitar.
I guess this subject has come up, due to me getting a message on Facebook, after I had posted a status asking if anyone in New Orleans knew "of any jobs available around here."
It was from Paul Zadrosny, the guy who, 35 years ago, had played the drums at the one and only performance by The Suffering Snails.
He was offering to pay money for any of those old cassettes that I issued forth each Christmas for 5 consecutive years.
For trivia buffs, they were entitled:
1984 "What Can You Do?"
1985 "Parallel Lines"
1986 "This Is My Head"
1987 "Enlarged To Show Texture"
1988 "The Little Girl In The House on the Corner"
1989 "Law and Order"
Then, in 1990, after having dropped out of college, and started to work full time, the Christmas albums stopped. Having equipment stolen from me around that time didn't help the cause.
And having all of my cassettes stolen along the way means that I have none of mine to sell to Paul.
But, it was on the strength of those tapes that I had wormed my way onto the list of musicians at the Lose It at the Lake party.
But, when The Suffering Snails rehearsed in Rick Shaw's basement, I left a bunch of things under the category of "To Be Announced," having faith in the inspiration coming to me "at the last moment" and we had only run through a couple of the songs in the manner of a technical rehearsal.
For other ones, like "Rock and Roll Music" by The Beatles, we just ran through the chords and I told the guys that I would change the words and they would be a surprise to everyone at our performance of them.
And I also said things like: "I might just vamp on a couple chords and make stuff up; maybe look around and sing about the things and people that I see, type of thing." We never practiced doing that, though, and I never stopped to ask: "You do know what a vamp is, right?" or other questions that might have helped us.
It was going to be magic that would save us. You'll see, it will all work out...I must have thought I was playing in the Grateful Dead.
It was a disaster.
With the unsettling feeling that the host of the party was thinking: "As a favor to the Peer Pressure guys, I'm letting this guy whom I've never heard of, play. Even though he technically doesn't qualify for being here. The rest of these guys are fixtures in the local clubs; many of them teach at music stores and most of them have cut albums or e.p.'s." We went up on stage.
There are some things that can only be learned through experience. I had never played through a 15,000 watt setup before.
The other guys were buckling under the pressure, if the nervous looks they gave me before we started were any indication.
But, I was fine. I was going to improvise something out of thin air at some point, I thought.
Now, one of the problems with that, is that people can't tell the difference between something someone is inventing on the spot, and something that they have run through a hundred times in rehearsal. They tend to think that it's the latter, but that you are screwing it up so it sounds like you are making it up as you go along.
As far as the sound system, it was hard not to hear the echoes coming back a few seconds later after having traveled across a lake and bounced off a building, or the hills in the distance, and not think: "Geez, that's me. That's the voice that I have been using my whole life, and now, 5 seconds after I sing something, I'm hearing it again, and it sounds insecure and nervous, and people 2 and a half miles away are thinking the same thing..."
We began "Rock and Roll Music," by the Beatles, and I began to sing the (secret) lyrics that I had in my head, to replace the original ones.
"We're here to play some more rock and roll music...
whether or not you choose it..."
This was an allusion to the fact that the band before us had played nothing but reggae for about 45 minutes, and the guy's after us were to be a jazz quartet.
Before the first line was even out of my mouth, it became saturated with copious amounts of echo. It was like a knee jerk reaction, I thought, by Pete Sawyer from behind the soundboard. "He only does that for singers that are sounding bad," was the distracting thought that came to me.
"We've got a lake here, you can lose it...
And a keg, but don't abuse it...
Gotta be rock and roll music; if you wanna drink with me...
Yeah, if you wanna drink with me...dum da da...
It ended right there, intended to be just sort of an introduction, but one that seemed to resonate like getting off on the wrong foot, so to speak. Maybe it was a peeve of Mr. Collette that I was focusing on the kegs of beer when it was the music that he wanted to be center stage.
Maybe he wasn't legally allowed to distribute beer on such a grand scale without having obtained a special license, or without having carded everyone; and here I was, broadcasting to everyone within 5 miles "We've got a keg, but don't abuse it..." Who knows; I know that we pretty much did a sucky performance of the old rock and roll standard.
And the copious amount of echo had me wondering.
I then segued into a joke, which was something like:
Yeah, go easy on the alcohol. Last night I got so drunk that I came home and mistakenly put the wrong key in my door. It was my car key..
But what was weird was, the house made the sounds of an engine turning over and then started up and sat there idling; it woke up the whole neighborhood...
It was indeed a joke that I had thought of the night before, yet, amid the groaning sounds I heard one guy yell: "Aw, that's a Steven Wright joke!"
hmm...Stephen Wright...what else can go wrong?
It wouldn't have been the first time I wasn't the first one to think of a certain joke.
So, then, after playing the Grateful Dead song "Cold Rain and Snow," I was out of jokes, except for the joke of a performance that was to come next.
It was my song: "The Night of the Living Porcelain" which was about a porcelain skull with a porcelain snake wrapped in an out of the eye sockets which I had bought at a flea market."
Intended to be a macabre almost Halloween inspired little ornament, I took it home and put it on my book case.
Then, I wrote a song about me dropping acid and the snake coming to life and chasing me around the house, or of my hallucinating it..wouldn't the effect be the same in either case?
And that was what "Living Porcelain" was all about.
Do I remember the words? Let's see.
"Well I was laying on my bed; It was 9:30 at night
Peace was in my head; I had just dropped some 'cid; and I was looking at;
my porcelain snake on the bookshelf; with a porcelain snake through its eyes.
I had picked it up at the flea mart, They wanted just 2 bucks; what a pleasant surprise...
(band kicks in)
Well it was in such good condition; I was pretty damned proud of myself
As I viewed my acquisition; across the room on the wooden shelf
Now my outlook on life was improving; as I started to catch a buzz
And the snake, you know, it seemed to be moving
BECAUSE IT FUCKIN' WAS!!
chorus:
[CAUSE it was the night of the living porcelain
the night the reptile came to life
the night of the living porcelain
the night I slept with a knife]
The reptile's scales were glistening as it slid across the floor
My heartbeat began quickening; I was looking towards the open door
I thought that I could beat it;
but I might have to make a dive
but I might have to make a dive
If it headed me off I was in for the worst; I might not get out alive
I heard my little sister shout; she thought she'd heard a mouse
I said "Lock your door and don't come out, there's a reptile in this house!"
Then it started chasing me, now I was really afraid
Because the f*** thing was pacing me; and I'd forgotten where I left the can of raid
[chorus]
Then I felt it grab me and I landed on my back
It's fangs were about to stab me; when everything in the room went black
I woke up hours later; glad to be back in bed
My joy was made even greater; when I noticed the snake was back in the head
[chorus]
But, just as we were beginning the song; the lyric sheet that I had taped to the mic stand blew off, and wound up in the lake, so I had to try to remember the words, on top of everything else.
After we finished, there was mostly silence from the audience.
I walked over by the soundboard and was about to say something to a guy who was standing around, and he just turned and walked away from me. Isn't that just like a lot of people. Had we gotten a huge ovation, the same guy probably would have been there to shake my hand.
But, among the crowd were the Pattersons, Tim and Shawn, who walked over and told me "We really dug that; we knew what you were trying to do; f*** these people..."
It was 3 years later that I ran into Shawn again at the mall, he was putting a notice on the bulletin board: "Lead singer/frontman wanted for new band."
"Hey, you're the dude who played the song about the porcelain head at the Lose it at the Lake party, aren't you?"
He reminded me that he and his brother had been the 2 (out of 250) people who had liked the performance, and basically the only 2 who had spoken to me after it was done (Rick, Paul and Jeff had gotten in their cars and high tailed it away from the scene).
Shawn then pointed out the notice he had just tacked up, and invited me to audition and, against my better judgement, given that they were even worse at pulling music out of thin air than the Suffering Snails had been, I met them at their padded room and soon became the lead singer for Warp 5.
And so, I guess this story has come full circle
But, just as we were beginning the song; the lyric sheet that I had taped to the mic stand blew off, and wound up in the lake, so I had to try to remember the words, on top of everything else.
After we finished, there was mostly silence from the audience.
I walked over by the soundboard and was about to say something to a guy who was standing around, and he just turned and walked away from me. Isn't that just like a lot of people. Had we gotten a huge ovation, the same guy probably would have been there to shake my hand.
But, among the crowd were the Pattersons, Tim and Shawn, who walked over and told me "We really dug that; we knew what you were trying to do; f*** these people..."
It was 3 years later that I ran into Shawn again at the mall, he was putting a notice on the bulletin board: "Lead singer/frontman wanted for new band."
"Hey, you're the dude who played the song about the porcelain head at the Lose it at the Lake party, aren't you?"
He reminded me that he and his brother had been the 2 (out of 250) people who had liked the performance, and basically the only 2 who had spoken to me after it was done (Rick, Paul and Jeff had gotten in their cars and high tailed it away from the scene).
Shawn then pointed out the notice he had just tacked up, and invited me to audition and, against my better judgement, given that they were even worse at pulling music out of thin air than the Suffering Snails had been, I met them at their padded room and soon became the lead singer for Warp 5.
And so, I guess this story has come full circle
*it is very much a sign of the times that the spell checker put a red squiggly line under the word, as if, in 35 years VCR's have gone from being a household item to: demagnetizer tape, what the hell is that?!?"
